Responses to assignment

1. What do you feel the word creation implies? That there is a Creator.That there is no void – which necessarily means infinity.

2. In your own words describe your impressions of the chapter “Creation” in Science and Health. Here are a couple of impressions that are pretty new to me and not at all definitive or sure of themselves. They are impressions that I’m exploring now and that are delighting me.

There seems to be a lot of “infinite” in the chapter. It’s like someone took the lid off. Everything about creation seems very large, inexhaustible, universal, burgeoning... The spontaneous energy of reality continuing to appear... There’s a feeling that creation isn’t a tame formal rearrangement of known pieces, but newness constantly appearing – so we may not even recognize ourselves unless we have the flexibility of thought that children have.

I’m wondering if the two Bible quotes that introduce the chapter are the divine view and then the human sense of creation or growth.

First, the divine view of never born and never dying: “Thy throne is established of old: Thou art from everlasting.” Its unchanging scientific reality.

Then the human experience of creation or growth: “For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now. And not only they, but ourselves also, which have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body.” In some ways this is sort of like a journey from sense to Soul and “the redemption of our body.” It describes what it feels like. It’s the correlative. And so the chapter looks at the loss of “earthly hopes and pleasures,” or of “personal friends.” And it speaks of, what the marginal heading calls “blessings from pain.”

3. How can the increased understanding of true creation make a difference in your life? Better yet, share with us how the truth of creation has been, or is being, demonstrated in your life. A lot of ideas are poking up. Here are two:

“Love, the divine Principle, is the Father and Mother of the universe, including man.” (S&H 256:7)

Scientists have been pretty sure about the Big Bang for some time now – a sort of amoral chain-reaction expansion – so it’s almost quaint to think of creation being Fathered and Mothered by Love. But then there’s experience...

My daughter and I generally take a walk in the late afternoon. Sometimes the weather in winter is uninspiring: dark and gray and cold. And the state of the world can be even more dismal. But we consistently find marvels: a skiff of snow picking out the shapes of leaves on the ground, the way bubbles form in a stream, or the burbling sound of the water. Once there were three levels of clouds moving in different directions. Another time we delighted in the sound of ice breaking when we stepped on frozen puddles. Are these little things? Yes. But the light of beauty that breaks through in thought during our walks is definitely not little. It’s like Love preparing a table before us, feeding us, in the presence of enemies.

”Thought is borrowed from a higher source than matter, and by reversal, errors serve as waymarks to the one Mind, in which all error disappears in celestial Truth.” (S&H 267:22-25)

I was praying with a woman who lives alone in a remote area that was having extreme winter conditions. The issue was a long-time physical condition that medicine believes to be incurable. We had worked together for a short time about a year ago, and that had ended when she became very discouraged and dismissed me. This time after a week of work there was another flash of frustration – not dismissing me so much as declaring that it wouldn’t do any good to continue. But prior to this she had been sharing her earnest and sincere prayers with me. Something didn’t feel right about just dropping everything.

At this point I read about waymarks and by reversing her fear of being alone I could see the waymark pointing me to the “Strongest deliverer, friend of the friendless...” and that this woman was “Beneath the shadow of His mighty wing.” I emailed her, suggesting that if working with a practitioner didn’t seem helpful for her now, did she want me to be a friend. She wrote back immediately that she really needed a Christian Science friend. So we began exchanging emails as friends.

After just a few days, a weather emergency came up and she asked for practitioner help with that. The stream by her house was flooding and it looked inevitable that it would reach her house that night as it was raining very hard on top of lots of snow and the forecast was to rain all night. The rain stopped soon after we started praying, the waters receded some, she felt peace, and she was very grateful the next morning that the situation was stabilized. So then she wanted help again for the physical need. She could see a way to continue praying.

All of this is a long way of saying that I hadn’t realized how large the reversal of the error would be – or rather how bright and “celestial” the appearing of Truth would be. The case is a kind of case that I have wanted to serve better in my practice.